Chapter XII

HARRY STANHOPE’S NOTION OF BEING A YEOMAN.

Harry Stanhope was welcomed with open arms by everybody in Friarton, and Horace was more than tolerated for his brother’s sake. Fan Constable had struck the key-note of public opinion in this England which some people call democratic, when she said that a gentleman ‘generations deep’ could do anything, always supposing he did it with characteristic grace, and win golden opinions on all sides. What Oliver Constable was condemned and ostracised for attempting to do, because he did it out of loyalty to his class, a deep sense of duty to his kind, and the most practical form of Christianity, Harry Stanhope was universally applauded and caressed for trying to accomplish in his burlesque fashion in an idle whim, certainly with no other motive, save that of serving himself and Horry.

It was no matter that Harry far outdid Oliver in the liberty he took with the world of Friarton. Oliver only went to his mill and his shop, seeking to revive his old familiarity with business details, and planning how to bring to bear upon them his version of trade principles. He contented himself with reviving his acquaintance with old friends of the family in a conventional enough way, simply making it plain that he acknowledged their obligations and was content to take his place in their ranks.

But Harry flaunted his descent from the squirearchy to the yeomanry in the most outrageous style. He ‘went the whole hog,’ as he had said. He was like the stage misanthropes who growl and gibe till men doubt their sincerity, only Harry’s blue eyes were too round and limpid for one to suspect them of depths of hypocrisy. He meant everything he did while the fit was upon him. He was in earnest so far as he knew, when, like hermits in general, he went far beyond the original professors in his actions.

Harry with his shadow, Horace, not only dined at twelve, sometimes in the fields in close proximity to his workers, and supped at seven, he made his own hay, whether the sun shone or the rain fell—not to the benefit of the hay in the latter instance, drove his own carts, galloping the cart-horses to the injury of these sober-minded animals, and led the hoers among beans and turnips with an impartial energy which threatened to demolish alike crops and weeds. He laid aside the civilised encumbrance of a morning coat, as if he were engaged in perpetual cricketing and rowing matches. He walked with a pitchfork over his shoulder as some squires carry a spud, when the tool was quite unnecessary. And he did what no yeoman within a radius of many miles of Friarton had thought of doing within the memory of the oldest inhabitant—he came into the town in character, in his shirt-sleeves, riding a bare-backed horse, as he had been taking it to water, when it had flashed across his mind that he might be in time to intercept the post letters—not that Harry’s letters were of any particular consequence, either to himself or other people—or that he ought to look after a job which was in progress for him at the saddler’s or the smith’s. He actually astounded the assembled Friarton market, he did not scandalise it—nothing which Harry could do did scandalise his neighbours—by entering it in such primitive guise. He had made up his mind, to begin with, that to be a yeoman at Copley Grange Farm was the same as being a colonist, and the more he brought his establishment and personal practice to what Harry conceived to be the colonial level, the more refreshingly novel the play was, and the more he enjoyed it.

Horace did not adopt all Harry’s new customs, for the sufficient reason that Horry was a sickly fellow, unable to cope with Harry in braving fatigue and exposure to the weather. But Horace not only found no fault with his chosen champion in his antics, the brother liked the changed life, and was the better for it in body and mind, because Harry, while he was still tasting its essence, and skimming its cream, enjoyed it with the lad’s naturally huge omnivorous appetite for enjoyment, and Harry’s enjoyment was always more or less infectious where his nearest friend was concerned.

The infection spread to more than Horace when Harry came into Friarton Town, in the fancy dress which he had taken into his head to wear, whistling or singing aloud in his fine baritone, though the song was of no higher musical or intellectual calibre than ‘The Two Obadiahs,’ with sheer lightness of heart and gleefulness of spirit, the very pessimists, in the habit of finding the foundations of the world out of joint, and holding life to be stale, flat, and unprofitable, were won to smile, as well as to sigh. Harry Stanhope was such a goodly spectacle in the flush of his youth and strength and exuberant spirits, if one could but forget that there came a term to these magnificent animal gifts, and a just reckoning for the days of their triumph. After all, the recollection only lent a wistful charm to all that was fleeting in Harry’s glory.

It was not merely those who were closest to his own class—the Wrights, Fremantles, and the vicar’s family—who delighted in Harry and conspired to spoil him as the finest young fellow in the world, perfectly charming, so delightfully natural, frank and unpretending, so imperturbably good-natured in accommodating himself to the difference in his position—though, to be sure, he could not forfeit his birthright. It was not merely Fan Constable who beamed on Harry as on a gay and gallant deliverer from the social depths into which Oliver’s extraordinary recantation had consigned them afresh. At the same time, Fan alone saw meeting in Harry, in the strangest, most fascinating manner, both the confirmation and the contradiction of all her early predilections and aspirations, until, in mingled conviction and reaction, she was ready to honour gentle breeding more than ever; while she became in a way reconciled to Oliver’s flight, which appeared to coincide with Harry Stanhope’s course. She began to feel dubious whether Oliver were so entirely wrong as she had supposed, whether he were not following, without guessing it, a veritably noble and knightly impulse in his raid against modern trade dragons, and his search for the San Graal in the homeliest quarters. That dim undefined notion, whether true or false, did much to restore Fan’s equanimity and cheerfulness. What did it matter if the Wrights and Fremantles, who were so frightened for hazarding their own debatable footing, turned their backs, when Harry Stanhope lent the Constables the far greater weight of his support, and constantly directed upon them his laughing face, coming to Friarton Mill ten times oftener and on twenty times more friendly terms, than Oliver with his contradictory spirit authorised?

Yet Oliver too, in spite of himself, liked the lad for the very qualities which were the furthest removed from Oliver’s own—the boyish thoughtlessness, sanguineness and absence of any sense of responsibility, the half-kindly and wholly confiding selfishness which impressed on Harry the rooted belief that the whole world revolved, somehow, round him and Horry, and was in a manner made for their gain or loss; the half-audacious goodwill which made Harry claim, so unhesitatingly and in such a large measure, the goodwill of his fellows. Harry was as free from self-consciousness as he was mercurial, and the summer sun warmed him through and through, without his being ever troubled with a shiver of repulsion, or a groan of obligation, in the view of wrongdoing and retribution on every side. Oliver was tempted to admire as well as to despise, to covet while he condemned, Harry’s monstrous exulting egotism.

After the first shock of his sister Fan’s inconsistent secession to Harry Stanhope’s side of the question, Oliver looked on, without surprise, if a little sardonically, and witnessed Harry’s unbounded success in Friarton.

For the very Dadds and Polleys, who cherished a deadly distrust to one of themselves that had penetrated to a higher sphere and professed to return to his own, fraternised in a manner with the intruder, called him ‘the right kidney,’ a pleasant young gentleman as ever lived, taking his frolic as he was free to do. Bless you, he could not really let himself down, be he ever so willing. His people and his class would see to that. It was only his way of making fun. He was a gentleman-farmer, like the lord-lieutenant, or as the late Prince Consort had been, though he amused himself with aping the old yeomen. And he had no fad of raising up the middle-class, any more than he had of leaping over the moon. He gave himself no airs of superior wisdom and virtue. It was only that he could make himself happy anywhere, and had an agreeable word to say to everybody; while nobody was such a donkey as to mistake Mr. Stanhope’s manner or presume upon it.

Old Dadd laughed loudly at Harry’s pranks, recalling old members of the gentlefolks he had known who drove coaches and made walking tours in sorry disguises for bets. He entertained Harry himself with these reminiscences, to which the lad listened with his usual affability, old Dadd standing hat in hand the while and Harry forgetting to bid the draper cover his head in the mock yeoman’s presence.

Jack Dadd was enchanted when Harry not only enrolled himself a member of the cricket club, but presided over its entertainments in the ‘Admiral Keppel’ afterwards. Here was an adherent worth having, an authority as ready as he was great, from his unimpeachable advantages, on sport and horseflesh. It was rather in pure enthusiastic homage to his gifts and attainments, than in lurking sycophancy, that, though Harry was fain to render himself hail-fellow-well-met to his new associates, Jack began by deferring to him unfeignedly, and headed the other members in cheerfully acknowledging Harry’s born supremacy. The would be man of the people accepted the unsolicited tribute as a matter of course, and not at all as if he disliked it. On the contrary, he showed a very fair capacity for playing the cock of the roost in addition to his other performances.

And only Oliver Constable groaned over these indications of what would be the sort of alliance formed between Harry Stanhope and his adopted class; how the members of widely severed sets in society brought together through self-interest and for self-indulgence, would play into each other’s weaknesses, and simply work out their mutual lapse and loss.

Strict disciplinarian as Mrs. Polley was, she did not object to her girls giggling at Harry Stanhope’s exuberant chaff, and exultingly accepting bets of gloves and ribands with him, in which the Miss Polleys were always the winners. Mrs. Polley did not exactly understand that Harry Stanhope, who at his present stage was incapable of being anything else than boyishly friendly and merry with all women, had chaffed in precisely the same manner the barmaids of his earlier acquaintance. Mrs. Polley herself smiled broadly on Harry’s jokes, and called him ‘a good sort,’ a perfect gentleman, none of your stuck-up pretenders—unquestionably Harry was not a _stuck-up_ pretender.

The one dissentient voice in Friarton was that of Catherine Hilliard. When her cousin Louisa took the brothers under her wing, as if Harry needed the protection, and doted on the youngest, she would have had Catherine dote on him also. Mrs. Hilliard was too good-naturedly selfish, too hilariously cynical, too well occupied on her own account, to be a regular match-maker, supposing there had been scope for anything save sick match-making in Friarton and the neighbourhood. But she would not have objected, from the first hour she spent in the company of the would-be yeoman, to making up a match between Harry Stanhope and Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard would have lost her cousin as a constant companion, but she would have found a jovial ally to her heart’s content in Harry. And if the attractive young man’s worldly wisdom was not his strong point, that was Catherine’s look-out, not Mrs. Hilliard’s. He would form the most hospitable and genial of kinsmen and neighbours, if he might not have all the qualifications for a safe husband. On the other hand, the contrast between Catherine and him was all that could be wished. It would do Catherine a world of good to have her bookishness—detestable in a woman—her untenable notions, her chillness and asperity, routed out of her by a gay-tempered, easy-minded husband, whose easy-mindedness might not preclude the wholesome discipline of any amount of obtuseness and stubbornness, when interference with his masculine prerogatives was in question.

But unfortunately, Catherine could not see the beauty of the contrast between herself and Harry Stanhope, as establishing an incontestable point of union where the two were concerned. ‘He is no better than an overgrown boy,’ she said, with a half-weary scorn. ‘He has not a thought or care beyond his pleasure.’

‘My dear, that is what is so particularly nice about the boy,’ remonstrated Louisa Hilliard. ‘You and many other people are weighed down with care, and the consciousness of care, to no purpose. What we specially want at this epoch in human history, is a robust faculty of enjoyment.’

‘I think I prefer the poor deaf fellow,’ said Catherine, in her spirit of contradiction. ‘He loses his identity in that of his brother.’

‘Is that such a boon to the world, to lose one’s self and live in one’s neighbour’s life?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard, shaking her head in merry incredulity. ‘I am not sure that it might not prove easier and more comfortable, on the whole, to be another than to be myself. I should feel so deliciously neutral, you may be sure—nothing could touch me very nearly. Your toothache would tingle quite bearably, suffered by reflection through my nerves.’

‘I don’t think it is quite so with Mr. Horace Stanhope,’ said Catherine coldly. ‘I don’t suppose you understand, Louisa.’

‘Not I, farther than that it is not in _you_ to go with the multitude, either for good or evil. Child, I am certain it is for good, and to our credit, when the rest of us heartily admire and like a fine, manly, friendly fellow like young Stanhope, and I should have thought—though I am not super-subtle in my intuitions—that you would have valued him for standing by the poor creature his brother; whom, with what I must call a morbid taste, you set yourself to prefer to the fairy prince in his own person.’

‘What!’ exclaimed Catherine, ‘value a man for caring for the dog which is fonder of him than of anything else in the world?’

‘Well, there is a proverbial estimate of “a dog’s life,” while there are many good sorts of men that kick their dogs occasionally, when they need chastisement,’ speculated Louisa, maliciously treading on one of Catherine’s hobbies.

‘Yes; and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals exists for the punishment of men’s brutality,’ said Catherine, with her pale cheeks flushing.

‘My love, the Society has to do with ruffians—let us trust they are comparatively rare. You are speaking like a girl who has been brought up by maiden hands, who expects a man to behave like another girl such as herself, not to say like an angel. She does not take into account his different nature and rearing, together with his greater temptations; she shrieks hysterically, and calls his least faults by preposterously exaggerated names. Men who have nothing to do with her either laugh at her, or fall into ecstasies over her baby innocence. But woe betide her and her husband—should she consent to take such a necessary appendage—if she will not open her eyes, and submit to know a little more of the world. You must accept an older woman’s word for it, Catherine, that a man may kick his dog when the animal is troublesome; he may even swear a little at his wife, under great provocation, and yet neither be absolutely barbarous nor profane.’

‘There may be something in what you say with regard to the wife’—began Catherine, in perfect sincerity, but was stopped by the laughter of Mrs. Hilliard.

‘For shame, Catherine, to prefer a dog to a man—or rather to a woman. Never mind, there is another respectable old saw to draw inferences from, in this case: “Love me, love my dog.” No doubt you are paying Harry Stanhope the most delicate of compliments in your favour for Horace.’

Catherine disdained to reply to the insinuation.

But though Catherine declined to add to the number of Harry Stanhope’s worshippers, she appeared, like the other women, to be drawn into his court where he stood the centre, next to Mrs. Hilliard herself, of the bright stirring drawing-room at the Meadows. Catherine’s imagination tempted her to speculate, with however little hope, on the diversities and vagaries of human character. A new type arrested her, as an unknown specimen stops and holds fast the naturalist. Harry was strange to her in the sparkle of his bold thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and pure and simple egotism. The qualities were all naturally repugnant to her, still they attracted her curiosity for a time, as qualities which she had never met before, and might never meet again, in the same degree or combination. Catherine, too, looked and listened as if carried away with the charm when Harry, nothing loth, figured as the hero of the hour, recounted his youthful exploits by flood and field, volunteered, without a grain of shyness or scruple as to the acceptableness of his service, to be at the beck of any and every woman present—for Harry was no languid, supercilious, fine gentleman. He was a gallant cavalier to the heart’s core. He only asked to be allowed to help every woman, while he helped himself liberally to the first place in her regard. But he was the reverse of the odious cowardly personage—we may trust he figures more largely in fiction than in real life—the lady-killer, professed or unprofessed. All was open and above board with Harry; and upon the whole his attentions were too impartial to have much individuality or to be invested with special danger. It seemed as if he consented to be heard or seen for the entire sex’s benefit, as he span his yarns—not particularly original, wise or witty, but with an indescribable charm in them, due to their fresh lightheartedness—of his school and college frolics: his prowess at ‘hare and hounds;’ how he was a bogie to his dame; his surreptitious introduction of ‘Pin Him’ into his quad; the row he had been in when town fought gown; the wrinkle he had been able to give such an awfully clever fellow as Tyler in making up for the private theatricals at the Wests—whose place was near Harry’s cousins. Then he sang his songs whenever they were wanted; songs less aggressively warlike and sportsmanlike than the songs of Jack Dadd and the other peaceful counter-jumpers—sometimes love songs, or songs expressing passionate memories, and tender yearnings, with fiery depths, and pathetic echoes which Harry Stanhope had never fathomed, but which yet thrilled the listeners as the words and airs were given by the full flexible young voice.

It looked as if Harry were carrying all before him, and winning each heart—including that of dreamy, dissatisfied Catherine Hilliard.

Oliver Constable judged so, as he lounged and contorted himself unnoticed in the background, and said it was the way of the world and that young beggar’s luck, of which he was not worthy, which he could not be expected to prize at its proper value.

Two people knew better. Catherine Hilliard could not be called one of the two, for she never took the question into consideration. It would have felt too preposterous to her to enquire beforehand, what her feelings might or might not become, for any hero of flesh and blood. Besides, Harry Stanhope was not a man to her, only a boy, a big, merry boy, who formed a momentary study for the thoughtful woman.

Mrs. Hilliard, while she was perfectly conscious of the latent antagonism between Catherine and Harry Stanhope, still threw them somewhat ostentatiously together, making Catherine play the accompaniments to his songs, and causing him—which was a little of a trial to Harry’s good temper, to be always on the side of Catherine—an incorrigible bungler, almost as bad as Oliver himself—in the lawn games in which Harry Stanhope and Fan Constable were adepts, a pleasure for game lovers to look upon. Mrs. Hilliard elected Harry to take down Catherine to the improvised suppers which were apt to follow the improvised parties at the Meadows. Mrs. Hilliard could manage these manœuvres with so much ease that it robbed them of half their attractiveness to the manœuvrer, she was wont to complain privately, since Catherine was as blind as a baby to any premeditation in such arrangements, and was only more or less bored by the consequences. All the same, it was her, Louisa Hilliard’s, duty to do what she could as a hostess in the judicious assortment of her guests, and to show her cousinly regard by doing what she could also to prevent Catherine’s missing, by anything save her own folly, the chance of what would never be a great and yet might prove a suitable establishment, in days when girls, far more attractive to the generality of men than Catherine was, could not pick and choose in making a match.

If the hostess baffled and plagued any rival pretender—say Fan Constable—to a lion’s share of Harry Stanhope’s universal attentions, so much the better for Mrs. Hilliard’s entertainment, and if it were so much the worse for the rival pretender, whose fault was it save her own?

Harry Stanhope was not so egregiously foolish in his vanity as to fail to penetrate the fashion in which Catherine Hilliard was taking stock of him, weighing him in the balance, and finding him hugely wanting. ‘Look here, Horry,’ he protested, thrusting his fingers through his fair hair in comical discomfiture, after an hour’s compulsory companionship with Catherine, ‘that girl has been looking at me through a microscope, and picking holes in my credit all the evening; she knows not only how I was ploughed in my smalls, but all about that time I was rusticated for the beastly row at Walsh’s, though I never told her a word of the mess. I say, I wish the old woman’ (an irreverent reference to Mrs. Hilliard, to which the lady would not have objected in the least) ‘would not persist in pairing us off together. It is no go; though no doubt Miss Hilliard’s tin might be of use in the farm, she would not have a gift of me, and unfortunately I could not get the tin without offering my precious self in exchange.’

‘Ain’t she more the style we’ve been accustomed to—I mean among our people—than Miss Constable, for instance?’ enquired Horry, doubtfully, of his oracle. ‘I think Miss Hilliard is rather a fine girl; looks like a lady without making a fuss about it.’

‘True, oh king! She is stately in her stiffness as a stage duchess. And she is a sap as well as a swell. I bet you she reads as hard as old Herculaneum, not that she ever alluded to a book to me, except to one of Lever’s stories, which she just mentioned tentatively, with great scrutinising eyes fixed upon me, the better to assure herself that it was something in my line. But I have glimpses of the old beggars the English poets, and so forth, if not of the Greek and Latin humbugs, in the turn of her neck and the wave of her hair; I am in constant horror lest she should so far forget herself as put me through my exams again—which line in “Paradise Lost” I prefer, or whether I agree with Bacon that gunpowder ought to have been invented before lucifers. I don’t think I can stand it much longer if Mrs. Hilliard will go on acting as if we were made for each other, though I am prepared to own that Miss Hilliard is innocent of any pretence in the matter. How could it be otherwise when she is so stunningly wise and learned, and the rest of it? Oh! I say, when you see all that, and the knowledge don’t crush you, suppose you go in for the lady and the tin, to be ploughed and harrowed into the dirty acres of Copley Grange Farm, and so relieve your brother-officer of the obligation, Horatio?’

Horry laughed the discordant laugh of the deaf, and mumbled a disclaimer of the honour and the implied preference on the part of Catherine, while Harry went on speaking out his thoughts to his second self with yet greater zest. ‘Now, Miss Constable believes in me—fact, I assure you. That plucky, go-ahead little woman is, not to say swindled, by me, for to do myself the justice, I never sought to take her in; but she gives me credit liberally for a thousand manly virtues I don’t possess. She half tempts me to believe in them myself,’ protested Harry, with an excited laugh. ‘It is not like you, old fellow, who have rowed in the same boat with me ever since we two came into this blessed world, and have naturally grown rather blind to my weaknesses and besotted about me altogether. She who never saw me till this season, with all her cleverness, and she is uncommonly clever, which is better by a long chalk than being bookish—not that she is not an educated woman also—does more than take me on trust. She endows me with all the energy and endurance which are hers, not mine. She speaks as if I were going, single-handed, to bring in the waste places of the earth, and found a family. Confound it, Horry, it’s rather nice, and generally improving to be believed in like that by a handsome, good woman, as true as steel, I’ll wager my head, and as proud as Lucifer in her own way, while she is ’cute enough in anything else to see through a millstone,’ finished Harry, complacently stroking his beard, as if he were beginning to suspect that he was really a finer fellow than he himself, or any other person, save the faithful follower by his side, had given him credit for.